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The Wednesday Web Browser for Writers

by Erika Dreifus on
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Welcome to the Wednesday collection of gleanings from the Web:

  • Noted by The Cincinnati Review: “We receive about 1,500 poems, stories, and essays a month through our online submission manager, and many of those submissions get read by our staff, who have noticed the following trends. . . .”
  • The latest author to contribute to the “My First Time” column on David Abrams’s wonderful blog is Susan Woodring, describing her first telephone conversation with her agent. (P.S. Huge congrats to David on the selection of Fobbit, his forthcoming novel, for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program.)
  • Next week will bring the June issue of The Practicing Writer, which will feature a Q&A with Midge Raymond, author most recently of Everyday Writing: Tips and Prompts to Fit Your Regularly Scheduled Life. Right now, you can learn more about the book and enter a giveaway on Goodreads.
  • Speaking of giveaways, there’s also still a bit of time remaining to leave a comment and be eligible for one of our own Short Story Month Collection Giveaway Project offerings.
  • Poet Diane Lockward shares the qualities that draw her to (or repel her from) online literary journals.
  • Who can’t benefit from a refresher course on the comma?

    • The Wednesday Web Browser for Writers

    by Erika Dreifus on
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  • I’m thrilled for my friends at J Journal: New Writing on Justice, because a story by Paul Stapleton (“The Fall of Punicea”), published in the spring 2011 issue, has won a Pushcart Prize! This is the journal’s first Pushcart Prize. An excerpt from the winning story is available on the J Journal website.
  • If you don’t follow my other blog, you may not have seen the link to the Moment magazine online “symposium” dealing with the question “Is There Such a Thing as Jewish Fiction?”.
  • Thanks to @realdelia I’ve discovered Kommein, a new site that looks pretty useful. Here’s the post that has drawn me in: “10 Mistakes You’re Making on Your Brand’s Facebook Page.”
  • Maurice Sendak has passed away.
  • The Quivering Pen is condensing Short Story Month to Short Story Week. Don’t miss the fun!
  • Don’t forget the two book giveaways we’re running right now!

    • Quotation of the Week: Rebecca Makkai

    by Erika Dreifus on
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    “One of the first difficult lessons that I had to learn as a writer was to push my characters into doing really inappropriate things, whether it’s a criminal act in this really extreme case, or just saying something that a normal person would keep their mouth shut about, or forcing a confrontation. In everyday life we act really politely and we don’t always say what is on our mind and we don’t always get ourselves into messes. But you have no story unless you’re willing to push somebody to the brink. You find the moment where the character says something they wouldn’t normally say or does something they wouldn’t normally do. They go over that line and you have a story.”

    –Rebecca Makkai

    Source: This terrific, extensive interview in Trop. (FYI: We have a Q&A w/Rebecca right here on this site, too.)